


maybe you're my favorite sinner

by pprfaith



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, But it's really more Gen, Gen, Post Bulletville, Weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-22
Updated: 2012-09-22
Packaged: 2017-11-14 19:41:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/518827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Coming and going, running and stopping. A direct continuation of <i>Bulletville</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	maybe you're my favorite sinner

**Author's Note:**

> I am absolutely convinced that, if anyone had believed in him, Boyd might have actually managed to go straight. So this is the story about that. And other things.

+

When he was a kid, Raylan had this idea that life was a straight line. A long, dusty road, with six billion people all going in the same direction, just at different points in their journey.

He had this idea that life was a straight line and that, if you run fast enough, you can get away from anything. Even goddamn Kentucky.

+

He finds Ava in the woods, afterwards. She didn’t run far, because Ava never runs far. She’s got her gun clutched in her hands, close to her chest and no-one’s ever going to accuse Ava Crowder of being a bad shot, but her gun-handling leaves something to desired. 

He says her name, loud and clear, before he gets within thirty feet of where he can just see the orange of her vest peeking through the scraggly underbrush. 

She doesn’t give herself away by asking if it’s him, but she doesn’t shoot him as he comes around into her line of vision either.

“Are you alright?” is the first thing out of her mouth, followed closely by, “Where’s Boyd?”

Raylan remembers, then, maybe for the first time, that he isn’t the only one who has a history with Boyd that didn’t start with bloodshed. 

Raylan thought sixteen was too young, that summer in the mines, but Boyd never did and for a while, he courted Ava like a gentlemen from the old black and white movies his momma watched, all flowers and love songs and Raylan watched from the sidelines, hot under the collar from jealousy he didn’t know who to aim at. 

He should probably ask, one day, what happened to shift Ava from Boyd to Bowman. What happened to change Boyd from a crazy hillbilly intellectual to…, well. They’ve all changed, far too much in some ways, and not at all in others. Harlan is teaching Raylan, slowly but surely, how to tell these things apart again. 

He forgot that, though, for a while there, back in the car with Boyd and everything just like it used to be, Raylan and Boyd on their way to raising hell. 

“He said I was his only friend left in the world,” Raylan blurts without meaning to, looking at Ava, leaves in her hair and blood on her hands. Boyd’s blood. Last time, he was the one that helped keep Boyd’s blood inside and this time it was her and why is there always blood involved, anyway?

She looks taken aback for a moment, before asking, “Are you?”

He shifts his empty gun into his left hand, offers his right to help her to her feet. She comes willingly. 

“Some days,” he tells her as he studiously scans the tree line that he knows to be clear except for a lot of dead men that will piss Art off so very badly. “I wonder what the hell happened to us.”

Ava drops his hand, uses her own to wipe some of the grime from her jeans, and says, “You left.”

+

“Are we going after him?” Ava wants to know when they reach the cabin again. Raylan looks up from his cellphone – no reception, who would have guessed – to find her staring down the road the Miami girl disappeared down, followed by Boyd. 

Boyd who has a grudge and a bullet in his shoulder and a whole damn lot of dead men spooking around his head right now. 

“Well, we need to get somewhere with reception at any rate, so why not?” 

His car is still where he parked it, but two of the tires and the windshield are shot out. It’s not going anywhere soon. They start walking wordlessly, trudging along next to each other too tired to really be angry with each other anymore. 

Physically, neither of them has slept in something like three days. Emotionally, there have been ex-fathers-in-law, ex-wives, dead husbands, fathers, lovers and a whole damn lot more shit to deal with. 

So they walk.

There’s bodies behind them and there’ll be hell to pay for what Raylan did here, eventually, but when he tries to scrounge up some sort of regret or anger for that, he can’t quite manage. Instead he tallies the losses for today. Two dead in his motel room, one wounded – who just happens to be his daddy. And here, two dead by Boyd’s hand, one by the Miami people’s, three by his. Eight bodies on the ground and the sun’s just come up. 

“Boyd was different after you left. Angrier and dumber and louder,” Ava suddenly says, studying a tree they’re passing as if it holds the secrets of the known universe. 

He jerks to look at her, surprised, but she just picks another tree to fixate on and keeps talking. “An’ crazier. I never met anyone as crazy as Boyd Crowder. Except you, but you were gone, so. I picked up with Bowman because I figured he was the safe bet. The one Crowder, wouldn’t go off the rails.”

She kicks at a rock, sends it skidding. “Shows what I know about men.”

It all comes back to Harlan, doesn’t it? To Harlan and to Raylan walking out. He never believed it when Boyd crooned Patty Loveless in his ear, but he’s starting to. He’ll never leave Harlan alive. None of them will.

He rubs at his face, screws his eyes shut. 

“Jesus.”

+

They walk for an hour before they find Bo’s car precariously teetering on the edge of falling into a ditch. Boyd is unconscious in the driver’s seat, bleeding all over the upholstery.

On the upside, Raylan has reception again. 

+

Art descends on them, followed shortly by a swarm of Marshals and crime scene techs and angry EMTs that insist on checking Raylan and Ava over while they give their statements. 

Boyd is carted off to the nearest hospital in semi-critical condition. Raylan isn’t worried. Boyd is like a particularly tenacious brand of cockroach. 

He is, however, concerned with Art screaming in his face about ‘a goddamn trail of corpses, Raylan, you should have _called_ me!’

“There was no time and I couldn’t risk Ava’s life going through the official channels.”

“So you took _Boyd Crowder_ with you?”

“He was there when the call came.”

“Why was he there in the first place?! Were you two having a sleepover?!”

“Bo killed his men,” Raylan says, very quietly. Those men were all ex-cons and low lives, but if they believed what Boyd believed – and he did believe it, Raylan knows that now – they were trying to do better. And no-one, but no-one, deserves to be strung up on a tree and shot like cattle. “He didn’t know where else to go.”

“So he came to you? The Marshal who shot him?”

Raylan looks away, meets Ava’s gaze across a sea of efficient, awake people. She looks damn tired. 

“We were friends once, Art,” he confesses, three months late and far too calm.

Art splutters and Raylan smiles blandly. “Can I go now?”

+

He sleeps in a room with the outlines of two bodies on the floor and his father’s blood on the bedspread.

+

He’s there when the forensics and the Marshals and the FBI and the DEA and god knows who else start in on Boyd’s camp. 

He buried the men. 

That’s the first thing Raylan notices when he steps foot in the hollow in the woods. Boyd buried his men, all of them, and he did it the way a hunter knows to, deep and good. 

It must have taken hours.

The second thing Raylan sees is that tattered, heavy bible Boyd has been carting around, dropped between the graves and an outcropping of rock, carelessly left to the elements. Raylan steps into the spot where he imagines Boyd must have stood or sat, and wonders if this is where Boyd lost that faith of his. 

He leaves when they start digging up the corpses. 

+

Bobby Joe Packer does not rescind his confession, even after Art leans on him, tells him how it ended.

He keeps his faith and Raylan almost envies him the serenity on his long, scraggly face.

+

Ava sits with Boyd for two days until he wakes up.

If anyone notices the gun she totes in her purse, they don’t call her on it.

“Don’t think you’ll be needing that,” Raylan tells her when he comes to visit himself. He brings Boyd ox-eye daisies, just for the irony of it. 

“That Miami woman’s still out there, isn’t she?”

He smiles at her, best as he can. “I’m working on it.”

Ava looks from him to Boyd and back. “Do it before he gets out?”

“Are you worried that he’ll get her, or that she’ll get him?”

“Yes.”

+

There’s an inquiry into Johnny’s death. Raylan is there to hold Ava’s hand as she makes her statement and when Vasquez gives him a foreboding look, he smiles with as many teeth as he can fit in it.

+

Evidence proves that Boyd had nothing to do with killing his flock, and that he only shot in defense of his own, Ava’s and Raylan’s lives. 

He gets out of the hospital with his arm in a sling, just in time for Johnny’s funeral, and then Bo’s the next day. 

“He just stood there. Didn’t say a word,” Ava tells Raylan afterward on the phone. “I don’t think he rightly knows who he is, anymore.”

Raylan laughs. “Who in the hell does?”

+

“Look,” his landlord says. “You been a good customer, but I can’t have people shootin’ other people dead in my motel, Marshal. Not even if it’s a lawman.”

He packs his bag and the two boxes full of his shit and sits on the still-bloodied bedspread, fingers hovering over the speed dials of his phone.

He considers calling Winona, for a moment. Big, empty house and old comfort and the not negligible factor of fucking Gary’s wife in Gary’s own bed. 

He finds another motel across town, instead, and calls Ava to tell her the change of address.

“You’re not stayin’ with your ex-wife?” is the first thing she says and in the background Boyd asks, “Is that Raylan?”

“Boyd is staying with you?” 

It’s a stupid question because, obviously, yes, and it’s not like he has anywhere else to go at the moment. His home is a torn up graveyard, these days.

“Raylan.”

Raylan thinks of how he felt when Winona took off that ring. He thinks of how he felt when she put it back on. He answers, “No.”

“Why not?”

“Didn’t seem like a good idea.”

+

Helen comes to visit him at work a week after Bulletville. She brings pie that doesn’t taste as sweet as he remembers it, sits on his visitor’s chair and looks around.

“So this is how a lawman works.” She smirks. 

“How’s Arlo?”

“You shot your own father in the arm, Raylan, how do you think he is?”

“He tried to sell me down the river to a Miami drug cartel,” he points out, calmly, pretending he doesn’t see most of the office holding its breath to listen to their conversation. 

Helen presses her lips in a thin line. “Your mother would be ashamed of both of you.”

“Probably,” he offers and then turns back to his desk to feign paperwork until she leaves. 

+

He stays away from Harlan for a full two weeks, going so far as to outright ask Art to put him elsewhere, anywhere. 

He doesn’t even know why, doesn’t feel that clawing panic of walking into a place you know will be your grave, anymore. He remembers that feeling from down in the mines, where you dug a shaft and knew it might be where you spent eternity. It spread, that feeling, until it encompassed the whole town, and then all of Harlan. Nothing but a grave. But it’s gone now, leaving only echoes.

So he doesn’t know why he stays away, except for how everything is screwed up and raw and he keeps feeling old. So damn old. 

Boyd calls him at the end of the second week and when Raylan answers, all Boyd says is his name. 

“Okay,” Raylan says. “Yeah, okay.”

Boyd laughs, that startling, brutally bright laugh he so seldom lets free. “That was easier than I expected, son. Ava says to bring drinks.”

+

Boyd inherits Johnny’s bar, seeing as how he’s the only living relative. 

“You could keep it,” Raylan suggests. “Be a barman. You been just about anything else, haven’t you?”

“Is that your subtle way of telling me to take up a legitimate profession, Raylan?” Boyd wants to know, putting his glass of shine down on Ava’s dining room table. 

They’ve been drinking here for an hour, both studiously not looking at the bleach stain where two Crowders bled out not too long ago. 

Ava took one look at Raylan’s face and got the hell out of dodge, mumbling about strange men that kept invading her property and ‘Crowders actin’ like they own the damn place’.

“Boyd,” Raylan retorts. “You managed to do illegal things as a damn _preacher_. I don’t think there’s any way to turn you legitimate.”

“But you would appreciate the effort.”

“I don’t think what I do and don’t appreciate has much of an impact on you at all, Boyd.”

He dislikes how easily he falls back into the habit of tagging Boyd’s name onto every sentence, the same way Boyd does with him, the way they used to, to make sure they weren’t ignoring each other. 

Boyd snorts.

+

They help Boyd move his meager belongings into the backroom of Johnny’s. He owns even less than Raylan, and what he does have is only clothes and books. 

Ava offers to help scrub the place down, front and back, but Boyd turns her down, tells her it’ll be meditative. Raylan wants to point out it’s also going to be damn painful with a two-week-old shoulder injury, but doesn’t.

Instead he gives Ava a ride back to her place and lets himself be invited for dinner. 

He kisses her in the kitchen and she gets suds in his hair and afterwards she rolls on top of him and wants to know, “I thought we were done with this?”

“Damage is done, isn’t it?” he shoots right back, thinking that should be his damn motto, because that’s how it always is, how he lives from day to day. Damage done. Carry on anyway.

The damage, he also thinks, might have been done long before any of them were ever born. Bo and Arlo set a path, same way their daddies did before them and Boyd and Raylan pretend they’re not their fathers’ sons, but that’s a load of bull. 

Arlo has a part in everything Raylan Givens is and isn’t. Even in the way he hates that, he can see Arlo’s sharp grin and dark eyes.

No-one ever leaves Harlan alive because Harlan never leaves anyone. It’s like black lung and the grit under your nails, something you carry around, for better or worse. 

“Look at that,” Ava snipes in the vicinity of his neck just before biting down. “A real romantic.”

+

Boyd does a reasonable impression of a legitimate business owner. There’s gambling in the back and guns under the floorboards in the storeroom and he wears a Colt tucked into his waistband, but he does have honest business, too. 

In the end, Boyd does let Ava have a go at the unused kitchen and he finds a woman to staff it five nights a week to ‘broaden the menu’.

He even has actual menus printed. 

Raylan is impressed and his drinks are always on the house.

+

He finds the bitch – Pilar – in Tennessee, hiding in one of Gio’s safehouses. 

The way he gets that information is neither nice nor simple, but it does the job. He makes sure that she notices him coming and when she tries to shoot him in the dining room – what is it with damn dining rooms – he puts one in her heart and one in her head. 

+

“Thank you,” Boyd says as he picks him up from the ER where they stitched up the graze on his left arm and Art yelled at him for a full twenty-three minutes. 

Raylan doesn’t ask if it’s for keeping Boyd out of jail or for hunting down his daddy’s killer. 

“You’re welcome.”

+

Arlo finds him one night, at Boyd’s, and makes a joke about matching wounds. 

Raylan stares deep into his beer until the old man leaves, refusing to rise to the bait. 

“You’re getting wiser, my friend,” Boyd points out from the other end of the bar, where he’s shushing a greasy-haired man who wants to buy a sawed-off from him. 

+

He sleeps over at Ava’s house most weekends and whenever business takes him down to Harlan. He drinks at Boyd’s bar in the evenings and he talks on the phone to both of them.

Sometimes he runs into Winona and he always smiles and tips his hat at her and pretends not to see her questioning looks. 

Boyd takes Ava to the movies and out dancing on Mondays, when the bar is closed.

Sometimes, when Raylan gets to Ava’s, Boyd is already there, in the living room, or in the bedroom.

Sometimes, when it gets late, he crashes with Boyd in the back of the bar, where they do things they haven’t done in twenty years. 

They all have supper together on Sundays and somehow fall into the habit of calling it ‘family dinner’.

+

A year after, Gio is still pissed at both Boyd and Raylan and the Dixie Mafia is moving in on Bo’s old stomping grounds, with Arlo putting up a weak but tenacious resistance.

Raylan shoots far too many people and never has nightmares and Boyd doesn’t shoot anyone at all but has nightmares almost every night. Ava is exasperated by them both and yet refuses to let go. 

They fight a lot but never manage to hold on to the anger anymore and Raylan thinks that means they’re getting old, or maybe wise, and then distracts himself. Most of his things end up in Ava’s house, mingling with Boyd’s, and his motel room starts feeling like a stop-gap between work and better things.

Life, he’s learned, isn’t a straight line but a circle and the faster you run, the faster you get back where you started from and there’s no escaping anything. Not even Kentucky. 

Art asks him, one morning, if he wants to take a job in Missouri. 

Raylan scratches his temple, shakes his head. 

“Nah,” he says.

+

When he gets home, Boyd and Ava are arguing about carpet colors on the porch swing.

“For the dining room,” Boyd explains after Ava grabs the color samples and storms inside, muttering about it being her damn house and doing as she pleases. “It’s about time.”

Raylan hums in answer, steals Boyd’s beer and stops running.

+

+


End file.
